The loss of handwriting also may be a cognitive opportunity missed. The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express their thoughts better — a lifelong benefit. Children who don’t learn…
Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some independence from the manipulations of marketing, which typically divert attention from what a thing is to a back-story intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands. Knowing the production narrative, or at least being able to…
Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. —F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Useit.com) Your goal as a web author is to put your best stuff in the hotspots. Obviously you can direct the user’s attention somewhat, using whitespace and graphics. But…
In Writing for the Internet, I had my students read some articles about e-mail and power relationships in the classroom. They are raising some very good questions in response. One asked me whether professors expect their students to send thank-you messages after every e-mail exchange. I just checked with two colleagues, and their reactions confirmed…
Why did Godin decide to create a book series based on third-party NES games, and why did he use the name F.X. Nine? His reasons were both sentimental and practical. Godin was talking to his 10-year-old nephew about his hobbies, and was surprised to discover that the boy had never read a book for fun.…
Of course, students already know how to read the highly emotional and symbolic language of television. They learned it informally by clocking in an average of 5000 hours in front of the set before they reach school age — the same amount of time it takes to jet around the world 148 times, or orbit…
A euphemism like “decision-based simulation” maybe, but rarely a “game.” To many, video and computer games represent an adolescent diversion, a parental annoyance that thwarts homework, chores, and all things productive. So when FAS and others stump for games as an educational or training tool, they begin by stating the problem: “You oversee a very…
I’ll also mention that “mute point” is an “eggcorn” — a new category of writing mistake that linguists have identified and my fellow college teachers might find useful in responding to student writing. I’m certainly glad to have a new tool that helps me climb down from the high horse I have occasionally mounted in…
Computers & Composition: An International Journal invites contributions for a special issue, Reading Games: Composition, Literacy, and Video Gaming While video gaming has been a strong cultural force since the advent of the popular coin-operated arcades of the 1970s, it is only within the last few years that video/computer gaming has been an academic focus:…
This class is unique in many ways, the most prominent is that students learn how to create new media resources for education. As Gee noted, “When people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy” (2003, p. 16). In this course students must develop an instructional game where all game elements are…
Reflections on Keys for Writers (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m paging through Ann Raimes’s Keys for Writers, which I used to use when I taught freshman comp at my previous job, and which I’m coming back to in the fall as Seton Hill offers a new “Basic Composition” course for the first time. (Our freshman writing offering…
I know it sounds nerdy, but I jumped at the chance to tag along on my husband’s business trip to Hartford, CT last weekend so that I could re-walk the 2 miles that Wallace Stevens used to walk to and from his home on Westerly Terrace to Hartford Accident & Indemnity each day. I took…
It’s only made worse by the lame assignments many comp instructors assign (or are forced to assign): 1. A turning point in my life! (Get ready for five hundred essays about, “The time I got drunk? And almost had a wreck? And now I realize how precious life is?” or 2. My personal hero! (Get…
Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a very exciting book. It captures an important set of developments — how new information technologies make it easier for individuals to collaborate in producing cultural content, knowledge, and other information goods. It draws links across apparently disparate subject areas to…
With their mouths largely shut but their laptops and flip phones open, teenagers’ bedrooms are beginning to sound like the library. So is the dinner table. On her show May 10, Ellen DeGeneres ribbed guest Lindsay Lohan: “Every time I’ve seen you, you’re out with eight or nine girls, having dinner. You’re all sitting around…
Youth and alienated populations are inclined to spend more time going through identity development processes because they are trying to “figure out who they are.” Blogs and profiles are particularly supportive of this. Of course, blogs require having something to say while profiles let you write yourself into being via collage. People do grow out…
Some of the features of paper are well known: Reading more than three pages of text on a screen makes your eyes bleed, but I can read paper for hours. You can underline, highlight, and annotate paper in a way that is still impossible with Web pages. And, of course, in the anarchy after The…
When I find significant errors in student writing, I chalk it up to one of three reasons: they don’t care, they don’t know, or they didn’t see it. And I believe that the first and last are the most frequent causes of error. In other words, when push comes to shove, I’ve found that most…
Michael Smith, professor in Temple University’s College of Education and coauthor of Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys, said the language of crisis was overblown but noted that the facts are plain: Boys read later than girls and lag them in both reading and writing across grades. They read fewer books, and value reading less. “If…
Email as a collaboration tool sucks. Everyone knows this. Everyone says it. Everyone writes about it. And everyone agrees that its inefficient, it’s chaotic, its silo’ed and its full of spam. Yet, in spite of these shortcomings, we can assume with confidence that email is still the preferred method of “collaborating” and sharing information with…